DuckDuckGo

TallTroll · February 20, 2012, 12:09:04 PM

Spent a chunk of the morning really playing with it. Now set as default search. It's like someone turned Google back about 10 years. Oh, and took the trouble to ask me which of the more advanced bits I wanted. Awesomwe

Brad · February 20, 2012, 12:44:24 PM

Yeah I like it. Straight up web search with minimal ads and junk and it delivers very decent results for the most part. And it isn't spying on me.

I don't use it on my phone, because with it I often do want the local bits.

Drastic · February 20, 2012, 01:56:57 PM

Tried it the other day, liked the results ok. Has an annoying delay for the serp to render.

keano · February 20, 2012, 02:31:06 PM

Had the impression that DuckDuckGo were using Bing's search technology? Has this changed or am I just wrong (the latter option is safest usually).

Brad · February 20, 2012, 02:46:04 PM

Quote from: keano on February 20, 2012, 02:31:06 PM
Had the impression that DuckDuckGo were using Bing's search technology? Has this changed or am I just wrong (the latter option is safest usually).

Bing is the backbone, but results come from several sources:
http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources

And DDG has their own algo layer to put this all together.

>delay

One of the non-JS versions might work faster:
http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216377-no-tracking

rcjordan · February 20, 2012, 05:02:18 PM

DDG has been working the tech blogs and reddit pretty hard for the last 4 or 5 months and may have gained a toehold. Last week I saw an article saying they'd just had their first million-search day.

TallTroll · February 20, 2012, 05:48:24 PM

Specifically, their first m+ direct search day, plus 10m API calls

rcjordan · February 20, 2012, 05:59:22 PM

Picky, picky.

Brad · February 20, 2012, 06:27:25 PM

TallTroll, so you are finding DDG okay for UK searches?

TallTroll · February 20, 2012, 06:54:36 PM

Time will tell, over the long term, but first impressions have been good

TallTroll · February 20, 2012, 07:06:35 PM

Hmmm, do DDG have a query rate filter?

rcjordan · February 20, 2012, 07:59:15 PM

US product serps seem slightly weaker than G, but it's a decent alternate for extending a deep search.

US travel serps seem OK ...my old stuff ranks.

Brad · February 20, 2012, 09:55:18 PM

US and international informational searches are generally pretty good. Commercial product searches are not quite as good as Goog with more spun content type sites getting into the DDG serps than Goog (but Goog sure isn't what it used to be either.) Still most of my searches are informational and DDG generally gets the job done sans clutter.

DDG does not have the depth that Google has but then who does?

Rooftop · February 21, 2012, 10:06:08 AM

It's pretty shocking on some of the commercial brand name searches I am working on at the moment. It's doesn't seem to be very good as knowing what is UK and what isn't. Worse though it is just full of dead sites and incredibly low quality ones with the spammiest backlink profiles. Pretty poor considering the number of high-street names and large players competing on these phrases.

Maybe it is this niche, but I'd say the results were worse than last time I tried duckduckgo.

TallTroll · March 07, 2012, 05:01:55 PM

Been trying to use it fairly consistently, seems to be doing fine. Not been using it exclusively, since I've actually been looking at stuff elsewhere, but when I've been using it for myself, I've rarely felt the need to switch, thus far at least